It all started with this lady. Elizabeth Gurney Fry, born 1780 into a wealthy Quaker family in Norfolk, England. At age 17 she opened a school in her home teaching the poor children of her neighborhood. She married Mr. Fry in 1800 and had 11 children while continuing to do good works. Those good works were mostly reforming the horrible conditions of women prisoners in Newgate prison, London starting in 1813. She and everyone she rallied for the cause made significant changes to the laws governing the English prison system. Men and women were separated, women prisoners could only be overseen by women prison guards, work was assigned to prisoners, living conditions were greatly improved, and a probation system with counseling was instituted to help people make the transition back to outside life easier in finding jobs.
When I was a fledgling social worker, fresh out of graduate school in 1967, I was inspired by Jane Addams, another Quaker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, in 1889, a place where European immigrants had a base of support to more easily integrate into our American democratic culture without giving up too much of their own culture. Respect and education were key concepts. Reform of difficult living conditions, instituting child labor laws, and eliminating sweatshops came after the situation had been studied.
She was responsible for instituting the 3 tenets of Social Work as I learned them in school.
- Start where the person is at.
- Assess the person’s abilities within the context of his or her environment.
- Help move that person to a better level of functioning through a combination of social reform and personal empowerment.
My first work experience was with a small Family Service agency in Galveston, Texas. I was one of their student social workers assigned 6 “cases” for 4 months in the dead of winter. It was raining most of the time, flooding the downtown area where I worked. I lived on a $90.00 a month mental health stipend in a motel with kitchenette on the seawall, a concrete levee that was built after the big hurricane of 1900 that everyone still talked about. Gulf of Mexico ocean spray caused my car muffler to rust out twice. Incidentally, I was driving an old pink T Bird convertible that my father bought me used. He said I needed reliable transportation. My first car. I think he really wanted it for himself. It was awkward driving that car into “the projects” of Galveston, not the nicest neighborhood, to take my assigned adolescent client to the doctor to get her birth control pills and give her a better model than her prostitute mother. She liked my T Bird. On balmy days, I would put the top down and we would have a picnic on one of the seawall sheltered areas overlooking the grey Gulf water.
I wanted to help people less fortunate than me. I wanted to be useful, to make my life count for something, to give back to others what I had received so far in my life. Little did I know how much more I would be given and taught by those I was working with throughout my 40 year career.
Let me tell you about one other woman I visited during that initial experience. I will call her Mrs. M. She lived up a flight of steep steps in a tiny garage apartment. That’s all she could afford. She was a tall, middle-aged woman who wore baggy brown stockings and torn house slippers. Her face showed signs of a hard life but her eyes were clear and her heart was generous. She had trouble with a painful hip but insisted on cooking lunch for me and supporting me with a strong arm up her rail less steps when I came to check on her once a week. We chatted as I sat at her table watching her assemble our lunch. She knew I liked hot tea, so she had the kettle on. The used tea bag was perched in a small glass on the table. A cockroach was crawling out of the glass. I ignored it. She brought the boiling water to the table, removed the tea bag from the glass, put it gently into my cup, and poured the water over it. After a few minutes I shared the bag with her. It was the weakest tea I ever had, I prayed that the boiling water would kill any germs from the cockroach, and I was most grateful for her generosity toward me.
Who was helping who?
Thriving Through It 